http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
NEW YORK, NEW YORK, what a wonderful town. Just now it's a tale of two towns, where the ashes
downtown testify to a tragedy and the heroism that lifts the battered human spirit.

A visitor arrives at Penn Station to confront a traffic jam near Ground Zero. Vice President Dick
Cheney, accompanied by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, is surveying the ruins of the World Trade
Center. They're engulfed in a greeting by rescue workers, policemen and national guardsmen. This is
the vice president's first eyewitness glimpse of the calamity. He takes a few minutes to autograph
hard hats.

Just a short distance away, at the U.S. Court House, four terrorists, associates of Osama bin
Laden, are sentenced to life without parole for bombing the American embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania. ``This is a time not for eloquence, but for justice,'' U.S. District Judge Leonard B. Sand
tells them.

If these scenes do not yet constitute ``infinite justice,'' they demonstrate how American justice has
both patience and perseverance and that democracy, in its own way, fights back. Cheney, depicted
on Saturday Night Live as living in a cave in Kandahar, indulges in a bit of self-mockery later at a
dinner at the Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue: ``The Waldorf is a lot nicer than our cave.''

New York, New York is alive with dramatic juxtapositions in the wake of the destruction of the
World Trade Center. For three consecutive days the October sky is as blue and as clear as it was
the day the suicide bombers struck on Sept. 11, and the streets are once more crowded with
walkers enjoying the bracing air of early autumn. But reminders come on whiffs of charred rubble,
ghostly odors that haunt pedestrians with the memories of those who can no longer enjoy the life of
the city.

The storefronts of the streets display the ethnic smorgasbord that makes the city sui
generis: ``curry in a hurry,'' tricolored couscous, falafel and piroshki, now all decorated
with American flags and posters proclaiming ``United We Stand.'' A shop on Madison Avenue,
with a window filled with costume jewelry, puts a gas mask on display as the centerpiece (at $250),
surrounded by stars and stripes of sparkling artificial stones in red, white and blue.

Uptown, with an unintended irony of timing, the Metropolitan Museum opens ``Treasury of the
World: Jeweled Arts of India in the Age of the Mughals,'' featuring dazzling jewelry of the Muslim
empire from 1586 to 1858. These jewels were bought by oil-rich sheiks in Kuwait and were lent by
Sheik and Sheika al-Sabah's own museum.

Rubies, emeralds, diamonds and pearls -- real ones -- are for sale in the museum shop. I priced one
gorgeous pendant at $58,500, and the clerk suggested I might have liked a more expensive one that
she had sold earlier. (Some people have all the luck.)

Instead of buying, I sought refuge in another show down a corridor. It seemed to capture the
paradox of human nature with insight more suitable to the times. Pieter Brueghel the Elder, the 16th
century Flemish artist, made prints and drawings depicting the seven deadly sins and the seven
virtues, vividly crossing the map of good and evil, generosity and excess, charity and depravity,
altruism and anger. In our Age of Terrorism, this exhibition can convey the failures and triumphs of
humanity with greater clarity than the hours of repetitive footage rolling past on flickering television
screens.

Anger, for example, is portrayed in both realistic and symbolic detail as ordinary men and women
are massacred by bestial warriors in a microcosm of menace. Some soldiers carry swords, others
merely an everyday knife that might be used to cut up fruit, cheese or paper. Evil erupts in the center
of these mundane lives as warriors emerge from a tiny tent in a village crowded with people.

The scene is charged with malevolent chaos. The roof on a house collapses. A castle burns. A bird's
nest with egg is abandoned. Everyday objects, a pitcher, a plate, a bowl and a bell, suggest a
civilization interrupted.

Finally the viewer is comforted by contrast. The virtue of charity depicts townspeople offering bread
to the hungry, water to the thirsty, succor for the wounded. Looks familiar. Sounds familiar. It's
New York, New York. A wonderful
town.